The fall of the Boudoir was spectacular, the debacle shocking.

We were expecting it, of course, we knew that once Expo 67 was over, the city empty of tourists, the party of the century enjoying its final excesses, Fine Dumas’s bar couldn’t survive: too chic for the neighbourhood, too expensive for the locals, too pretentious for what’s generally offered by the Main, that paradise for the poor and for lost souls briefly elevated, thanks to the mere presence of the Boudoir and perhaps for its greater misfortune, to the status of absolute must and meeting place for the well-to-do of the entire world. For us, Expo was a wonderful diversion from which we all profited, it’s true, a golden gift from the gods, an opportunity, as the boss herself put it so well, to “enrich ourselves,” at least for a while, and permission to live openly for six months with no fear of the authorities who for once, it seemed, were protecting, not persecuting us. Six months that sped by too quickly in a mind-blowing swirl of endless parties, of indescribable binges and avalanches of dollars that seemed as if they’d never stop.

But when the hour rang, when the time came to accept the fact that overnight the Boudoir had become obsolete, it was a shock for us all, though we’d been talking about it during the whole month of September because the city was more and more deserted by foreigners and the Boudoir was emptying out before our eyes. Around the time when Expo closed, even the weekends were depressing. There was less money, less fun too. Yes, we talked about it, but it was as if we were refusing to understand what we were saying or to see the true consequences for each of us of the Boudoir’s closing and the implications for the life of the Main: poverty that once again was lying in wait for us, the return to the street for the drag queens, who’d got used to working inside, sheltered from bad weather and non-believers, the restaurant for me, though waitressing didn’t interest me any more.

As for Fine Dumas, who may have been the biggest dreamer of us all, the most unrealistic at any rate, she spent her evenings sucking on her cigarette holder while pretending not to hear what was being said in the bar and not to see the collapse of her establishment. We all suspected that she was hiding piles of money somewhere, under her mattress or in some big suitcase because she didn’t trust banks, that she must have made arrangements for her immediate future; but we also knew that she couldn’t stand to be all alone in her apartment after reigning as absolute monarch over Montréal-by-night for more than a year. Like Gloria, the South American music specialist who’d ended up in a tiny apartment above a garage on Fullum Street after experiencing the beginnings of glory during the fifties, and as a result nearly went crazy.

It’s impossible to picture Fine Dumas slumped in front of her TV set with a bag of chips in one hand and a Pepsi in the other. Fine Dumas is a creature of the night just like Babalu or big Paula-de-Joliette; she needs neon lights and the smell of alcohol to survive, and shutting her away at home would be condemning her to a slow and cruel death – even with the small fortune she’d no doubt made from the sale of her business.

And so between a boss who listened to no one and employees who managed not to understand the real implications of what they said, the final weeks of Expo languished in shared boredom until one night we were facing the inevitable: an empty bar and an abandoned brothel. It was a gorgeous Saturday in October, the air was soft as silk, autumn had not yet brought out its grand symphony of loud colours, the city was experiencing one last thrill of pleasure before the endless months of winter. And we’d all come up against a brick wall.

When the boss asked us to meet in the bar, we realized at once that something irreversible was about to happen, that the cataclysm was going to be set off, and a few handkerchiefs were extricated from see-through plastic purses and decrepit makeup kits that had lived too long. Babalu in particular seemed devastated already.

“What’s going to happen to us without the Boudoir, everybody? I’m sure as hell not going to peddle my ass at the corner of the Main and St. Catherine! No way! Can the rest of you do that? Not me!”

She blew her nose, wiped away the tears that were drawing black lines on her chubby, fake Brigitte Bardot cheeks, she ran her fingers over her goose-pimply arms. I understood her. I understood all of them. The life that awaited them, the life they’d all known before the opening of the Boudoir, was shot through with many and various dangers, humiliating medical problems, over-long nights, excessively cold or hot, interrupted by pitiful and infinitely sad affairs that would profit some minor mobsters who were unscrupulous and heartless, deaf, mute and blind, ready for anything, especially the worst, all for the love of one measley dollar. For the six drag queens who’d taken up so much space in my life, the Boudoir had represented an unhoped-for salvation and they’d clung to it, hoping it would never end, though they knew perfectly well that it would only be around as long as Expo. And now the end was there, inevitable. We were walking straight to the gallows, heads high but with rage in our hearts.

Moored to the end of her bar like a ship in distress to its wharf in a storm, Fine Dumas had assumed the expression of a tragic actress, reserved for disastrous evenings when we passed through the bead curtains, maybe for the last time, as we all knew perfectly well, leaving the back room of the Boudoir where we’d spent such a wonderful summer. I had in any case, I who’d never dreamed of making so much money by having so much fun. I was surrounded by the brothel’s six “girls”: Babalu, Greta-la-Vieille, Greta-la-Jeune, Jean-le-Décollé, Nicole Odeon and Mae East. Wearing what I called my maître d’ outfit – my green sequined dress and my red pumps – I was the one who looked like the madam. But gazing down from my four feet and a couple of inches, I was not reassured. Mimi-de-Montmartre and Greluche, the two waitresses, were already sitting close to Madame, over a beer they were allowing to get warm because the urge to drink, to get drunk in fact, wouldn’t come until later, after the farewell speech we were all dreading. Fat Sophie, the Boudoir’s musician, was still bent over the piano, her vast back nearly as wide as the keyboard as she tinkled a sad song. The Duchess didn’t witness this distressing scene because the boss had told her some weeks earlier that she no longer needed her, not even on Saturday night. So the Duchess was the first victim of the wreck of the Boudoir. I wished she’d been there that night, because only she would have been able to ease the tense atmosphere, but Madame had forgotten or hadn’t thought it was a good idea to advise her.

For once, the boss removed her cigarette holder from her mouth to speak to us. She even went so far as to stub the cigarette in an ashtray near her elbow. Several butts were still smoking there, proof positive that Fine Dumas was very nervous when you knew how much she hated dirty ashtrays.

“Sophie, leave that damn piano for once and come have a drink with the rest of us.”

Fat Sophie did as she was told, after she’d closed the cover of her piano – something she never did. In her gesture there was a finality that devastated me.

Once the pianist was sitting at the bar, Fine Dumas regarded each of us in turn, and this time no one looked down.

I can’t repeat precisely what she told us because I don’t remember. I had to choose to forget it or I wouldn’t have felt like coming back to it. But the fact is that I won’t be hanging around here. It’s too sad. And the reason for the existence of this blue notebook is not the fate of the Boudoir; the bulk of what I have to say is elsewhere, in what happened afterwards, and I don’t want to linger over that sad, disastrous evening.

I will only quote the beginning of her speech to indicate the tone in which she spoke to us. After she’d lit another cigarette and released into the air-conditioned bar a curl of grey smoke, the one we’ll remember most because it marked a major turning point in our existence, she looked at her watch, then declared as if she had to leave right away, or even that she had an important meeting, “The Boudoir has been sold.”

Instead of looking at Fine Dumas while she was speaking, I studied the reactions of the nine individuals who’d been my fellow-workers for a year and a half, whom I would now have to abandon. I’d left everything behind to launch myself along with them into the only truly great adventure in my brief life; with them I’d built a world of illusion that had been somewhat ridiculous as an attempt to create something big with inadequate means; I had been handed the money they’d earned by selling a quick trip to paradise to passing strangers they would forget as soon as they were out the door; I had laughed – champagne glass in hand – with people I didn’t understand a word of; I’d been at the centre of a perpetual party that had lasted a year, in the company of a merry gang of lunatics, outrageous fake women I’d been surprised to discover I adored; and now it would all be undone and disappear because the person in charge of the premises was too proud to bring her prices into line with those charged elsewhere on the Main.

Ever since she’d opened the Boudoir, Fine Dumas had claimed that she would rather shut it down than give a discount to nobodies from the Main, noblesse oblige; that her Boudoir, her lifelong dream, was and would remain an exquisite and exclusive place, even if that meant tearing it down post-Expo, which was what she was getting ready to do, with no remorse – I was sure of it – for the bodies that she’d leave on the pavement of St. Lawrence Boulevard. Had she thought about us even once when she’d made that important decision? Maybe. But not as individuals whose lives would be turned upside down by her decision, she was too self-centered for that. She must have thought of us as some vague and shifting entity that had existed before her and would continue to exist afterwards, and told herself, sure she was acting in good faith, “Let them go back where they came from! I pulled them out of the gutter for a while, now it’s somebody else’s turn!”

Even me, a humble waitress she’d rescued from the Sèlect when I hadn’t asked anyone for anything? Very likely. Nothing is safe from a selfish person who’ll use any means to shed her guilty feelings, to get out of an awkward situation. And selfish was Fine Dumas’s middle name, of that we’d had plenty of proof.

My companions, all of them, were in tears. I was the only one whose eyes were dry. The boss had noticed that right away and she looked at me now and then, frowning, as if to say, “How come you aren’t bawling? How come I can’t get to you?”

I defied her one last time. I too had my pride.